


12 Monkeys Theme Week - Day 4 - Failure

by pirategirljack



Category: 12 Monkeys (TV)
Genre: 12 Monkeys Theme Week, Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 11:03:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3807991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirategirljack/pseuds/pirategirljack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cassie got sick in the spring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	12 Monkeys Theme Week - Day 4 - Failure

**Author's Note:**

> Originally part of 12 Monkeys Theme Week:  
> http://samiholloway.tumblr.com/post/115936715802/12-monkeys-theme-week-day-4-casserole

Cassie got sick in the spring, and that’s how they knew they hadn’t changed history enough. She survived the first night, so they knew she had the slower strain–and Cole knew the previous version of him, the one concurrent with 2015, would soon surface and s brought here. The plan was that he’d leave first, that he’d keep fighting.

He took her to her lab in the Baltimore CDC, even though most of the people she worked with had already died of had fled, and the whole floor was abandoned. Just as he remembered it. She wavered, and steadied herself with a hand on the edge of a table.

She looked exactly as she did that day. All he’s ever wanted was to avoid doing this again.

“You’ll be here soon. You have to go.”

“I can’t leave you.”

“You have to.”

He opened his mouth to say more, but an aching tingle started in his arm, creeping up into his palm and his fingers. “Not now,” he said.

“What is it?”

Something inside him jerked like there was a rope tied around it and someone had pulled on the other end. He slapped his hand to his chest and staggered back; he’d forgotten the exact way it hurt.

“It’s the tether. It’s pulling me home.”

“This is your home. Jones said so.”

“I don’t know how–but this–this is unmistakable.”

“How long?”

“Soon.”

“This isn’t the goodbye I’d intended.”

“I didn’t intend to say goodbye at all.”

She moved closer and wrapped her cold hand around his wrist. “I’m afraid.”  
“Me too.”

A noise downstairs–a door opening. “You’re coming.”

“Cass–”

She hugged him, fiercely, and he squeezed her back like he could squeeze the illness out of her. He held her until the last possible moment before the tether jerked taught and snapped him away.

“I love you,” he said, and then her pale face was gone and he was back in 2043–no, not 2043.

“Where is this?”

“Welcome back, Mr Cole,” came Jones’s voice. The older Jones, roughened by thirty years of smoking and surviving hell. “You’re late.”

“So’re you. How late?”

“Five years.”

“I was only gone two.”

“We brought you back as late as we could, but it took a very long time to find you.”

“We didn’t change anything. She still died in that empty lab.”

“You changed plenty, Mr Cole. And you have much to catch up on. Come.”  
Cole didn’t want to go anywhere. There wasn’t anywhere to go where he could be Cassie back–but he had the machine again. He could still save her. He could still find a way.

Cole dragged himself from the chair, every nerve screaming, and almost fell down the stairs. The doctors injected him with a new serum, a different color, and some of the pain ebbed. He followed Jones into the boardroom.

The mission wasn’t over yet.


End file.
